“Well, sir, I gives him a telegram to send to my gal, and he starts readin’ it.  So, of course, I ups and gives him one.”

“Pap,” said the colored youth, “Ah’d like you to expatiate on de way dat de telegraph works.”

“Dat’s easy ’nuf, Rastus,” said the old man.  “Hit am like dis.  Ef dere was a dawg big ‘nuf so his head could be in Bosting an’ his tail in New Yo’k, den ef you tromp on his tail in New Yo’k he’d bark in Bosting.  Understan’, Rastus?”

“Yes, pap!  But how am de wireless telegraph?”

For a moment the old man was stumped.  Then he answered easily:  “Jess prezactly de same, Rastus, wid de exception dat de dawg am ’maginary.”

An Irishman and a Scot were arguing as to the merits of their respective countries.

“Ah, weel,” said Sandy, “they tore down an auld castle in Scotland and found many wires under it, which shows that the telegraph was knoon there hoondreds o’ years ago.”

“Well,” said Pat, “they tore down an ould castle in Oireland, and there was no wires found undher it, which shows that they knew all about wireless telegraphy in Oireland hundreds av years ago.”

Soon after the instalment of the telegraph in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a little darky, the son of my father’s mammy, saw a piece of newspaper that had blown up on one of the telegraph wires and caught there.  Running to my grandmother in a great state of excitement, he cried, “Miss Liza, come quick!  Dem wires done buss and done let all the news out!”

TELEPHONE

The editor of The Japan Times says the telephone service in Japan is utterly bad.  He wonders “what Job would have done had he lived in Tokyo and wanted to telephone to the specialist on boils.”  He concludes with the following incident:  “A lady in Karuiwaza called up her house in Tokyo, left by the next train, got the call, and talked to herself in Karuiwaza six hours after she arrived in Tokyo.”

A suburban housewife relates overhearing this conversation between her Cape girl and the one next door: 

“How are you, Katje?”

“I’m well; I like my yob.  We got cremated cellar, cemetery plumbing, elastic lights and a hoosit.”

“What’s a ‘hoosit,’ Katje?”

“Oh, a bell rings.  You put a thing to your ear and say ‘Hello,’ and then some one says ‘Hello,’ and you say ‘Hoosit.’”

“There’s a story in this paper of a woman that used a telephone for the first time in eighty-three years.”

“She must be on a party line.”

The girl at the exchange, after you have waited fully ten minutes: 

“They don’t answer.  What number was it you wanted?”

EXCITABLE PARTY (at telephone)—­“Hello?  Who is this?  Who is this, I say?”

MAN AT OTHER END—­“Haven’t got time to guess riddles.  Tell me yourself who you are.”

“I believe,” said the impatient man, as he put aside the telephone, “that I’ll go fishing.”